Sir Frederick Lambert of the Royal Academy had gone very pale, almost grey. The coughing fits still racked his body from time to time, the bloodstained handkerchiefs departing from his lips to a place of concealment in the enormous desk. Ariadne was still abandoned on her island, the black sails carrying Theseus away. Powerscourt felt slightly disappointed that the painting had not been changed. He was growing rather fond of the mythological scenes. He wondered if they had Evensong on Naxos, Ariadne’s island, peasants in smocks, Dionysus himself in the front pew, a patriarch with a vast beard leading the islanders in prayer.
‘Johnston,’ Powerscourt began, ‘big man. Attributes paintings. Where does he come from, Sir Frederick?’
‘If he’s the Johnston I think he is,’ said Sir Frederick, ‘he’s the senior curator of Renaissance paintings at the National Gallery. They say he’s got a very ambitious wife.’
‘Would that pay well? The National Gallery, I mean, rather than the wife?’ asked Powerscourt.
Sir Frederick laughed. ‘Nowhere in the art world pays well, Lord Powerscourt. It’s as if they expect people to have a private income or make money from their own work.’
‘So Johnston might have a motive for wishing Christopher Montague out of the way?’
‘Yes, he might have such a motive. Montague would probably have become the leading expert, the one everybody wanted to consult.’
An enormous fit of coughing overtook Sir Frederick. He got up from his chair, clutching a couple of handkerchiefs, and staggered around the room, bent almost double from his spasms. Powerscourt waited.
‘There’s something else I’ve got to tell you, Powerscourt,’ he went on, as he finally regained his desk. ‘I only heard this the other day. In the weeks before Montague’s death there was a rumour going round the auctioneers and the art dealers that his article was going to denounce most of the paintings in that exhibition as fakes. Nobody knows where the rumour came from, but it circulated widely.’
A whole circle of suspects floated past Powerscourt’s brain. Horace Aloysius Buckley, on his knees at Evensong. He remembered Inspector Maxwell telling him that a man called Johnston from the National Gallery had been the last person to see Christopher Montague alive. He could see Roderick Johnston, a great bear of a man, turning over a length of picture cord in his hands. Someone from Clarke’s or Capaldi’s or de Courcy and Piper, peering intently at a scene from one of their paintings, a Cain and Abel maybe, David and Goliath. Ever present in his mind were the terrible marks on Christopher Montague’s neck.
Part Three
14
Mrs Imogen Foxe was sitting in the morning room of her great house in Dorset. The wind was swirling round the terrace outside the tall windows, blowing the leaves away. Beyond it lawns and gravel stretched for a hundred and fifty yards to a small lake with an island in the centre. In her left hand she held a bundle of letters. The top one was from her mother – how well she knew that handwriting – probably another missive telling her to be a proper wife. The next one was from her sister, and probably carried the same message. The third was from a cousin in America, the fourth was in an unknown hand, almost certainly male. As she opened it, two letters fell on to her lap. She almost stopped breathing. Then her heart was beating very fast. She looked around to make sure she was alone and hurried out into the garden, clutching the letters in her hand.
The first was a very formal note, indicating that if she wished to reply to the other letter, she could do so to the above address. The correspondence would be sent on. The second was from her former lover, Orlando Blane.
‘My darling Imogen,’ it began, in Orlando’s rather flowery hand,
I cannot say what I feel because others are going to read this letter. I cannot say where I am. I cannot say what I am doing. But I am well and I long to see you. The people here say they will consider allowing you to come and stay here or nearby. I do hope you will say yes. I am not allowed to write any more. Remember the sonnets. Orlando.
Imogen felt her emotions running away with her. She read the letter again. It was all very mysterious, very romantic. Sonnets. She remembered the trip up the Thames from Windsor, Orlando rowing away, looking impossibly beautiful with those blue eyes sparkling against the water. When she was twelve years old she had decided that she could only ever fall in love with a man with blue eyes. She hadn’t broken her vows yet. Sonnets, Shakespeare sonnets, whispered under the leaves of a weeping willow on the bank, her hand trailing in the cool water.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
It sounds as if Orlando is a prisoner somewhere, she said to herself. He cannot say where he is or what he is doing. Why would anybody want to kidnap Orlando and lock him up in a dark tower? She remembered the man who had paid his debts in the casino. Maybe he had Orlando under lock and key. Imogen peered closely at the letter to see if there were any clues as to its origins. There were not. She set off to walk to the lake, holding the letters very tightly in case the wind blew them away. She shivered slightly, not only from the cold.
We’re both prisoners, she thought. Orlando is locked up somewhere unknown, I am locked up inside a marriage to a man my parents forced me to marry. She had resigned herself to her fate. She went to the local dinner parties, full of hearty squires and their buxom wives, talking endlessly of hunting and the threat of higher taxes under a Liberal government. She received her husband’s guests, drifting through the evenings as if she were in a dream, her mind far away. She knew that most of the neighbouring families thought Granville Foxe had married a mad woman, seduced by her beauty into forgetting the vagaries of her temperament, the odd silences, the lack of attention she paid to local affairs. And, they said, she reads poetry, sometimes in foreign languages like French. No greater proof of insanity or mental decay could have been produced in hunting country than that. But on one point Imogen had remained absolutely firm since the wedding night. She locked her bedroom door.
When she reached the lake, the surface was choppy, a couple of ducks bobbing up and down by the water’s edge. She began composing her reply to the letter. She would make it very formal, she decided. Mrs Imogen Foxe thanks Mr Peters for his invitation to visit Mr Orlando Blane and has great pleasure in accepting.
Powerscourt found Chief Inspector Wilson pacing up and down the late Thomas Jenkins’ room in the Banbury Road. Wilson was looking perplexed.
‘There’s not a lot of progress, my lord,’ he said, ‘apart from a couple of people who remember seeing Buckley in Oxford on the day of the murder. We have talked to everybody who lives round about, all the streets for a hundred yards or so from here, and nobody saw anything unusual on the day the unfortunate Jenkins was killed. No strangers. Nobody out of the ordinary at all.’